Coyne: Study into how our nation’s history is taught could be of great service to Canadians

Note: I had written this column in defence of the Commons Heritage committee’s right to inquire into provincial education policies, shortly before the committee, taking heat from the opposition and no doubt under instructions from the PMO, withdrew the proposal. I stand by the idea, even if they don’t.

It is probably enough to make the case for the Commons Heritage committee’s planned hearings into how Canadian history is taught that so many people find the idea so outrageous.

The announcement was greeted with bafflement and ridicule in the media, while among the Official Opposition the reaction was closer to apoplexy. “Why are Conservative MPs now intent on telling provincial schools what they should teach?” NDP MP Libby Davies asked in Question Period. The party’s heritage critic, Andrew Cash, claimed the Tories were bent on nothing less than rewriting Canadian history for partisan advantage. “They’re obsessed with reframing history and rebranding it in the image of the Conservative party,” he told Postmedia.

Yet a third NDP MP, Guy Caron, pronounced himself “completely flabbergasted” at the idea, since as he told iPolitics “curriculum and history is clearly a provincial jurisdiction.” (Not just curriculum, mind:history itself.) For his part, the president of the B.C. Social Studies Teachers Association claimed the initiative signalled the Conservatives’ intent to transform the teaching of history into rote memory drills. “It’s just going to be all trivial facts and figures.”

Before this gets totally out of hand: No, Parliament has no power to legislate provincial school curricula, nor is the committee proposing to “tell provincial schools what they should teach.” It is merely proposing to study what they do teach. For those who have not read the committee’s proposed terms of reference, they include:

“A breakdown and comparison of relevant standards and courses of study offered in primary and post-secondary institutions in each of the provinces and territories;” and “A review of federal, provincial and municipal programs designed to preserve our history and heritage.”

Oh my God. The idea that the nation’s elected representatives should wish to better inform themselves how the nation’s history was being taught in the nation’s schools — to compare, if you can believe it, the curriculum in each of the provinces, maybe even draw some conclusions from what they learned… I mean, it’s all just too much to take in.

I realize there is a context to all this. The Tories have upset all of the kinds of people you’d expect would be upset by making such a to do about the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, which was after all the last war to involve the direct defence of Canadian soil. The committee’s list of areas of interest seems likely to inflame the same people, as it includes, along with Confederation, suffrage, peacekeeping and constitutional development, references to several other wars in which Canada appears to have been involved. First World War? Second World War? Korea? Who knew?

You can choose to regard the teaching of our military history as so much Tory branding if you want to. I’d be more inclined to ask why a country should wish to ignore such important episodes in its past. The two world wars were formative experiences in Canada’s development, massive national undertakings that challenged our capacities and changed our society.

Yet such was the power of nationalist myth-making that you could have been forgiven at one point for believing Canada was a kind of Sweden, useful only for diplomacy and peacekeeping. I recall a former Foreign Affairs minister claiming, no doubt absentmindedly, that Canada had no history of involvement in major conflict. A national columnist once referred to the Peace Tower as a “symbol of our neutrality.”

But this is hardly the only instance of our history having the inconvenient bits snipped out of it. Indeed it has been going on almost from the start. Historians of the liberal school, like Arthur Lower, plotted events on a narrative arc describing our evolution “from colony to nation.” The conservative historian Donald Creighton derided this as the “Authorized Version” of Canadian history, but he and others created their own storyline, in which the baddies were played by the Americans and the continentalists (at that time the Liberals).

Overarching all was a sense of Canadian history as a largely bloodless exercise, literally and figuratively: born of pure pragmatism, progressing through an orderly series of public works projects, said to reflect our “public enterprise culture.” The notion that Confederation might in fact have had deeply principled underpinnings — that, what is more, these were rooted in Lockean liberalism, and that this remained a major part of our political culture through most of the 20th century, was simply written out of the story: as for example, was George Brown, perhaps the second-most important figure at Confederation, but with unfortunate views on Catholics, Frenchmen and, worst of all, free trade.

This “peace, order and good government” version of our history — a throwaway line in the constitution, later falsely elevated into a national credo — has managed the difficult feat of convincing two generations of Canadian schoolchildren their history is boring. Boring! It’s one of the greatest stories ever told, teeming with colourful characters: rebels like Mackenzie and Papineau, madmen like Louis Riel and Amor de Cosmos, and the Falstaff of the lot, Sir John A. You could easily spend a year just on the early explorers and mapmakers.

That’s where our history is taught or studied at all, or has not fractured into a thousand tiny sub-disciplines, very interested in the parts of our national story — especially where these can be mined for grievances — not so interested in the sum: denying, indeed, that such a thing exists as a national history.

Perhaps the situation has improved since historian Jack Granatstein’s jeremiad, Who Killed Canadian History? If so, the committee will do us a service by reporting it. But if things are as bad as many critics contend, why would we not wish to bring it to light?

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Coyne: Study into how our nation’s history is taught could be of great service to Canadians